The packaging for many retail products is specifically designed to permit the products to be hung from a display hook. This display arrangement provides several benefits, including providing customers with an unobstructed view of the product, decreasing the amount of space necessary to display each product, and facilitating restocking operations.
Several different wall fixtures have been developed to meet the strong demand for hook display systems. The most prevalent are pegboards, hanger bars, wire grids and slat walls. Pegboard fixtures are similar to the perforated hardboard often used in residential applications for the hanging of yard tools and the like. U.S. Pat. No. 4,560,062, “Method and Apparatus for Supporting a Display Carton,” issued to Valiulis on Dec. 24, 1985, illustrates how pegboard may be used for the display of retail products.
Hanger bars are horizontally disposed thin slats of metal, often about 0.20-0.25 inch thick and about 1.00-1.25 inch tall, onto which a specially designed hook or similar device can be placed. As described and shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,286,764, issued on Sep. 1, 1981 to Pfeifer, several hooks can be mounted to a hanger bar and then selectively moved in a lateral direction to permit the efficient display of merchandise having a variety of different configurations and sizes.
An exemplary wire grid product display system is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,832,298, issued May 23, 1989 to Metcalf. Rows of evenly spaced heavy gauge wire extend horizontally and, at a significantly greater spacing, vertical support wires are welded to the rear of the horizontal wire array. The wire is often 7 gauge, or about 0.1875 in diameter. Hooks are mounted directly to the horizontal wires, but their horizontal movement is limited by the interfering vertical support wires.
Slat walls, sometimes also called slot walls, have horizontal slots to receive a mounting bracket. As explained and illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 5,582,376, issued Dec. 10, 1996 to Thompson, in cross section the slots have a tapered “T” shape. One end of a bracket having a “Z” shape is introduced into the stem and one of the branches of the “T,” and thereafter allowed to rotate into a fixed position.
The brackets and hooks used with each of the foregoing systems are generally incompatible with other fixture systems. For example, wire grid brackets typically cannot be used on hanger bars, wire grids, or slat walls. Accordingly, it is often necessary for merchants to stock and install different brackets and hooks for each type of display fixture. Manufacturers likewise suffer from lost economies of scale because lack of standardization necessitates the production and distribution of lesser quantities of a wider variety of hooks and brackets.